"Two months ago, the Brazilian Linux community gathered around BR-Linux invited Novell to answer 10 questions sent and selected by the users, about the company's stance on Linux, open source, licenses, document formats and other subjects." "Novell has been very consistent on this issue and we have publicly stated that we do not believe that Linux infringes on any Microsoft patents. That being said, our agreement with Microsoft takes the patent issue off the table for customers. We have simply made the patent issue a non-event as part of a customer buying decision."

What's the point of the OSS community doing nothing but trying to destroy Microsoft's market share?

It's not about that at all. It's about getting a format that open source software can actually use and manipulate. If you think that's trying to destroy Microsoft's market share then that's more a reflection on Microsoft and how you view this.

If Microsoft doesn't want to play, that's up to them.

According to you, it's been "proved" (proven) that OOXML cannot be compatibly implemented. Well, Novell engineers are working on it

Novell are basically working on getting OOXML documents consisting of nothing but text, bold and italics to display in Open Office. Implementing it as a whole is an entirely different matter.

Seeking to convert everything to ODF will not work since that format currently does not support everything that Office does

LOL. It's the reverse actually. ODF actually supports a great deal more than OOXML does, which is where many of the conversion problems have actually come from:

Apple has become successful because they thought carefully about what they could contribute and how they could define a lucrative market for themselves. As Steve Jobs put it, they learned that for them to win, Microsoft didn't have to lose.

Which is why the Mac still has miniscule market share presumably. The markets that Apple now make real money from, Microsoft aren't involved or can't get involved.

Currently, it's in Microsoft's interests to release their file formats in a way that could be accessed from other platforms.

It's not practically implementable on other platforms, and we have seen the reasons why played out in articles and comment on here over many months.

As much as you wish it to be the case, OOXML is not really tied into Windows.

Saying it doesn't make it true. Can you prove that to me?

It has warts and it is a big spec, but it can be implemented

Can you prove to me that it can be implemented in full? Can you point me to a OOXML test suite that Microsoft has produced, apart from Office 2007?

Instead of bitching about OOXML and seeking petty world domination through ODF (chances of that actually happening are slim), why not use this OOXML move as Novell is

Because OOXML is simply not usable.

Or one could build OSS document processing tools, so that you can use Linux servers to store and slice up Office documents or to process them for publication.

The format and what Office 2007 churns out as a test suite makes that impossible.

If the OSS movement spent less time impotently raging against Microsoft on forums...

No one's raging against Microsoft sweetheart. I'm merely advocating that open source companies use what they know they can implement rather than promising something that they can't.

Linux would actually have a shot on the desktop rather than being totally eclipsed by the Mac among the UNIX-using computer elite.

Running around, fannying about with trying to get compatible OOXML support is what is going to keep Linux and the Mac where they are.